If someone were looking for a platforming action game, there are better ones out there. If someone were looking for a Scooby-Doo game, there aren't.

There's a certain point in gaming where you just stop thinking about semantics of criticism and let a moment take you. It's probably after Nightmare scrapes his hulking sword across a castle wall with sparks nipping at Talim's feet as she runs up the wall ready to slice back at her aggressor. No two-digit number can validate the pure exhilaration of that moment.

A textbook example of a game that wasn't ready to be pushed out of the nest. What could have been an exceptional game founders in mediocrity because of an artificial timeline.

What should have been a fast, flashy, light-hearted affair is somehow grim and joyless. There's wonderful content here, but unfortunately most gamers won't ever see most of it because it's locked away behind a series of near-impossible challenges.

A light and breezy Sci-Fi romp, it has enough juice to occupy anyone in need of a good weekend diversion. It won't start trends (and I doubt it will set sales records) but there's something to be said for a project that's as solid and sincere as this one.

A player shouldn't have to slog through command list after command list before fighting a particularly challenging AI or human opponent. Patience may be a virtue, but it can also mean really stubborn.

Stark mastery of skills has its place, but it's a true shame that the developers couldn't shape Chaos Legion into a more compelling experience.

Right from the beginning, Silent Hill 3 tells its story with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The all-important sense of pacing that the first two games had is completely lost.

Both the humor and the flight mechanics are poorly implemented, and that provides too much of an obstacle to the success of the game.

It's a bad game that needs to be reviewed so other gamers out there can avoid being sucked into the whirlpool of uninspired gameplay, bland graphics, and generalized mediocrity that colors the entirety of the title.

The crucial fear-factor is missing, the sense of fight, flee or die that makes survival horror so effective.

I was disappointed that The Great Escape opted for a more conventional action-game route rather than challenging the player through a sim-like game of socially-based puzzle solving. But it's still a game that is varied and sophisticated enough to be fleetingly fun and worthwhile for any fan of the film.

The game's difficulty curve is totally thrown off balance. I can only assume the intent was to provide a greater challenge than player-friendly Armored Core 3, and not outright sadism.

Several unfortunate technical issues hold[] it back. The item inventory screen is pure hell to navigate.

A horrible game manufactured with the creaky spare parts of a rusty genre along with fallen gears from the movie hype machine. This is the kind of game that's given away when you order a large pizza and get the second one for half price.

Seen through a kid’s eye this game is very cool with its full compliment of squishing sounds and gun blasts. For adults, I suggest you look elsewhere for your entertainment.

The game's real mistakes were made at the design level, and that's a pity, because it contained the potential to be a much better experience than it ended up being.

I swear, I felt my IQ drop as I was playing the game, the sounds of brain cells popping melding nicely with the oh-so-bland cock-rock soundtrack that seems to be a requisite feature of sophomoric extreme sports tie-ins.

Its incredibly addictive drawing and animation succeed by providing a unique opportunity for your imagination to run wild, yet I can't help but be disappointed that the rest of the game doesn't meet the same impressive standard.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is just how easy the game is - winning battles doesn't take much strategy, at least not until the final boss.

I'm giving Advance Wars 2 an 8.5 because of the game's lack of any significant innovation (the missile silos and volcanos are nice, but one new tank doesn't cut it for me). The developers decided not to take any risks, which I can't really fault them for, since the first game was so damn close to perfection to begin with.

Instead of being a series savior, Dead Aim is more like Pete Rose finally admitting he bet on baseball. Too little. Too late.

Maybe this DX is redefining film grammar for videogames. Because in this case, director's cut means the same damn thing, complete with glitches and issues of the first game.

Graphics aside, battling with the Unlimited Saga system is clunky and completely unintuitive. The battle engine features an insane potluck of disparate elements, almost as if Square-Enix took all of the purged leftovers from ten or fifteen other games and smashed the scraps together to create the unholy videogame sausage that it is.

I think most disappointing for me was how Transmission lost a great opportunity to expand on the concepts "Battle Network" was built on.

Very polished and thoroughly enjoyable. But for a game that was subject to so many delays and such high expectations, it's disappointingly limited in scope and is sorely lacking innovation or refinement of any kind.

The combination of a unique concept and a refreshing original and light-hearted setting make WarioWare one of the pleasant surprises in terms of engaging original software on the GBA.

A glimmer of the first game's superb design and balance remains underneath these missteps, but the bottom line is that instead of building upon the solid foundation from the first game, they undermined it.